Today I have Jisse Reitsma from Yireo. Jisse and I have an open conversation around Mage Open Source Community Alliance and some reactions to the letter. We talk about the reaction from the Magento Association and talk a little about what could make it better. If you are interested in talking about this subject, please reach out to brent@brentwpeterson
Summary
The discussion on this week’s podcast focuses on the current issues developers are facing with Adobe and Magento. Two main issues discussed were the transparency of Adobe and the monolith and modularity dichotomy.
The Mage Open Source Community Alliance (MOSCA) open letter to the community sought to show that developers care about the Adobe products and believe that the open-source code that drives their products is neglected. Developers are accustomed to accessing a roadmap of the software shared with the broader community, which shows transparency, and some don’t believe that they are receiving that transparency with Magento.
It is believed that open source development lies in the hands of developers, and instead of just talking about the changes that they want to see, they can make it happen. That is one point that the open letter drove home. However, at this point, the change seems to be happening without actually any organization.
An important question in all this discussion is if there is indeed a split, who would own the trademark? Who is going to be the owner of the source codes? Who will be responsible for fixing the bugs as they arise?
If Adobe is not becoming more transparent in their decision-making, if there’s not a roadmap being published upon opensource, assuming that there is one, then actually the community will not see which way the whole Magento opensource thing is growing. Then, in the end, that’s going to mean that many people are just so unsure about a fundamental something that they’re either going to leave or create a fork or are going to stick with even Magento one. And that’s the direction we don’t want to go to. Something needs to change.
While some developers believe there is no need for a monolith, others believe it is functional. The proposed decomposition of the monolith by Magento does not leave developers with a choice. It is suggested that developers be given an option to decide whether or not they want to go the route of the monolith or modularity. It boils down to deprecating or not deprecating.
There are a lot of Magento merchants that use the software, and a lot of those merchants feel uneasy about where their version of Magento is going. A question that they have is if Magento gets more complicated, does that mean that it would get more expensive for them to run their store?
Some proposed solutions to having Adobe communicate and be more transparent with the community are having a monthly bulletin, utilizing social media, and employing a social media and marketing committee to keep the community informed. This way, developers could openly share their ideas and grow on them like trading at a bazaar. What is currently happening is that the discussion is taking place in a cathedral manner. There’s a lot of conversing and what comes out is a filtered down smooth message that doesn’t have teeth and is unopinionated. The beauty is that the community is in charge of the innovation, and the Magento association should bring it out.
What it comes down to is just more communication and transparency from Adobe would solve these problems.
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